Knowledge (XXG)

Motte-and-bailey fallacy

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for its existence is the desirability of the Bailey, which the combination of the Motte and ditch makes relatively easy to retain despite attack by marauders. When only lightly pressed, the ditch makes small numbers of attackers easy to defeat as they struggle across it: when heavily pressed the ditch is not defensible and so neither is the Bailey. Rather one retreats to the insalubrious but defensible, perhaps impregnable, Motte. Eventually the marauders give up, when one is well placed to reoccupy desirable land.
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The softening up is effected by convincing the audience that the dual meaning is somehow an exposition of a profundity. ... the strategy is, as in Foucault's "Truth and power", to first make use of the word in its redefined sense, then present the redefinition as if it had already been established as the deeper content of the concept. Finally, the impression of profundity is sealed by passages which elide both meanings at once.
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Some people have spoken of a Motte and Bailey Doctrine as being a fallacy and others of it being a matter of strategic equivocation. Strictly speaking, neither is correct. ... So it is, perhaps, noting the common deployment of such rhetorical trickeries that has led many people using the concept
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the other's position beyond what is required to attack it; Harris criticized such usage of the motte-and-bailey concept for "avoiding a true fight" by portraying the other unfairly, which Harris called the "offensive corollary" of the other's retreat to the defensive motte. In other words, the person
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as "whatever people take to be knowledge", without distinguishing between beliefs that are widely accepted but contrary to reality, and beliefs that correspond to reality. In this instance, the easily defensible motte would be the idea that what we call knowledge is what is commonly accepted as such,
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A skilled pseudoscientist switches back and forth between different versions of his theory, and may even exploit his own equivocations to accuse his critics of misrepresenting his position. Philosopher Nicholas Shackel has termed this strategy the 'Motte and Bailey Doctrines' (Shackel 2005; see also
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Unlike normal examples of equivocation where one exploits already existing, perhaps quite subtle, differences of meaning, Humpty Dumptying is hardly subtle. The differences in meaning are so obvious that equivocating by use of them cannot normally be pursued without first softening up the audience.
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A Motte and Bailey castle is a medieval system of defence in which a stone tower on a mound (the Motte) is surrounded by an area of land (the Bailey) which in turn is encompassed by some sort of a barrier such as a ditch. Being dark and dank, the Motte is not a habitation of choice. The only reason
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For my purposes the desirable but only lightly defensible territory of the Motte and Bailey castle, that is to say, the Bailey, represents a philosophical doctrine or position with similar properties: desirable to its proponent but only lightly defensible. The Motte is the defensible but undesired
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where an arguer conflates two positions that share similarities, one modest and easy to defend (the "motte") and one much more controversial and harder to defend (the "bailey"). The arguer advances the controversial position, but when challenged, insists that only the more modest position is being
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who attacks someone else for retreating to the motte could be "just as guilty" of retreating to a "siege engine" instead of engaging in a deeper dialogue with the other "out on the bailey". Harris pleaded for a rhetorical analysis that would explore disagreements more carefully and respectfully.
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advanced. Upon retreating to the motte, the arguer can claim that the bailey has not been refuted (because the critic refused to attack the motte) or that the critic is unreasonable (by equating an attack on the bailey with an attack on the motte).
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represents a philosophical doctrine or position with similar properties: desirable to its proponent but only lightly defensible. The Motte is the defensible but undesired position to which one retreats when hard
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but the prized bailey would be that scientific knowledge is no different from other widely accepted beliefs, implying truth and reality play no role in gaining scientific knowledge.
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Responding to Shackel's use of the motte-and-bailey concept, professor of rhetoric Randy Allen Harris objected to what he saw as the use of the concept to gratuitously violate the
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Informal Logic @ 25: Proceedings of the 5th International Conference of the Ontario Society for the Study of Argumentation (OSSA 5), Windsor, Canada, 14–17 May 2003
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Informal Logic @ 25: Proceedings of the 5th International Conference of the Ontario Society for the Study of Argumentation (OSSA 5), Windsor, Canada, 14–17 May 2003
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Fusfield 1993), after the medieval defense system in which a stone tower (the Motte) is surrounded by an area of open land (the Bailey) ...
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Shackel's original impetus was to criticize what he considered duplicitous processes of argumentation in works of academics such as
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Boudry and Braekman said that a retreat to the motte in a motte-and-bailey doctrine is a "deflationary revision" that is used by
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of the broad colloquial understanding of a term with a technical, artificially stipulated one as "
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Philosopher Nicholas Shackel, who coined the term, prefers to speak of a motte-and-bailey
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In Shackel's description, a motte-and-bailey doctrine relies on overawing outsiders with
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use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less."
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A motte and bailey castle. The motte is the hill with the fortified
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Harris was commenting on Shackel's paper from the same conference:
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made use of a motte-and-bailey doctrine when trying to defend his
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An example given by Shackel is the statement "morality is
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position to which one retreats when hard pressed ...
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The motte-and-bailey concept was popularized on the blog
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by distorting other people's arguments and failing to
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Index

motte-and-bailey castle
argument
informal fallacy

keep
Michel Foucault
David Bloor
Jean-Francois Lyotard
Richard Rorty
Berger and Luckmann
postmodernist discourses
Slate Star Codex
socially constructed
David Bloor
strong programme
sociology of scientific knowledge
conception of knowledge
equivocation
concept-swapping
Michel Foucault
arbitrary redefinition
elementary but inherently equivocal terms
truth
power
conflation
Humpty Dumptying
Through The Looking-Glass
pseudo-profundity
Daniel Dennett
deepity

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